“It wasn’t that long ago, Doctor, you begged me to come to the Institute to help stop Bobby Lee Crayline’s hypnosis. I came running. Afterwards, you said you owed me big-time and if there was anything you could ever do to—”
“I remember,” Wainwright said.
“In my book that was a promise. I’m here to collect.”
A long pause. She said, “Let me close the door to my office.”
I started taking notes as Wainwright looked through Crayline’s records, but after a couple minutes I flung the notes to the floor of the porch, too angry to write. My voice was even as I thanked Wainwright and told her she’d closed the account.
I hobbled toward my brother’s cabin, fists clenched as tight as my jaw.
I stood on Jeremy’s porch and willed myself calm. If he saw my anger he’d shut me out or disappear into the forest. I had to appear serene. The door was unlocked and I entered.
“Jeremy,” I called, stepping over the threshold. “Where are you?”
“Upstairs, in my office,” he yelled, joy in his voice. “Come watch me make money, Brother. The blustering drunkard is starting the day on a binge.”
I took the steps two at a time, strode the hall to his open office door. He was at his desk, wearing a dark pinstriped suit, pink shirt, tightly knotted tie. It seemed odd until I realized he was in his business mindset. He had his gentleman gardener garb, his button-down business dress, his retired academic outfit, his rugged outdoorsman wear … he affected the uniform necessary to fully complete each personality.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
He spun in his chair. The screens on his desk danced with charts and graphs and crawls of stock symbols. “The Chinese Ministry of Economics issued a report calling for increased spending on infrastructure. The drunkard is puking gold … I’ve got a heavy position in an Asian copper-mining company that jumped eight points in an hour on the Hang Seng Index. I’m about to—”
“NO! What the hell is going on here?” I said, flailing my arms, meaning here, the locale, the region.
He regarded me warily before turning back to the monitor. “Whatever kind of question is that, Carson? It’s vague. What are you talking about?”
I crossed the room in a half-heartbeat, grabbed the back of his chair and spun him to face me. My voice was a constricted hiss. “I’m talking about Bobby Lee Crayline. He just tried to kill me. He’s dead, thankfully.”
The surprise in my brother’s eyes turned to evasion, which in Jeremy was less a tactic than an emotion. He switched into acting mode, moving up-angled eyes back and forth, as if searching a catalogue of names in his head.
“I’m sorry, Carson. I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
“You know exactly who Bobby Lee Crayline is,” I said, sick of his games. “You got into the heads of everyone who came near you at the Institute. You needed to know what made them tick and how they could be of use to you.”
“That’s so cynical. I never had any real contact with the man.”
“STOP LYING!” I roared. From nowhere my hands were around my brother’s throat, lifting him from the chair, spinning him into the wall. “Did you know the staff at the Institute keep round-the-clock track of who the inmates talk to, relate to, spend their time with? It’s an interaction study to see who pairs up, weak with weak or weak with strong … and who appears to be using who.”
“It’s whom,” my brother snarled. “And it’s disgusting.”
“From the moment Crayline walked in the door, you started circling him. Nodding the first day, speaking in passing the second, eating together on day three. Five days later you two were bonded like Siamese twins. Crayline started his mornings in the community room, waiting for your dramatic daily entrance. The staff read the body language, Jeremy. You were the Alpha in the relationship. Big nasty dangerous Bobby Lee Crayline treated you like some kind of wizard king.”
“A pack of lies from a den of spies.”
“You know what else was recorded, Jeremy?”
“My bowel movements, from the sounds of it.”
I wrenched him tighter to the wall. “You and Bobby Lee Crayline sitting alone in a corner of the ward, Crayline sobbing on the couch as you patted his back and whispered in his ear. People like Crayline don’t cry like babies, Jeremy. What was all that about?”
Jeremy pushed my chest, hard. It broke my grip, sending me backwards. “All right,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender. “I remember Bobby. He had things clanging together inside him, issues.”
“Everyone there has issues!” I snapped. “They define issues. What did you and Crayline talk about?”
“I told Bobby things about my past. My experiences touched something inside him. He seemed fascinated at how I’d overcome my history. My abuse.”
“You told him how it ended?” I said. Jeremy had disemboweled our father and strung bits of him in the trees.
My brother smiled and stabbed his hand in the air, as though plunging a knife deep into tissue. “Not an end, Carson. A beginning.” He canted his head, regarding me with curiosity. “Helluva day, wasn’t it, Carson? The day the cops came to tell us we were free?”
… police at the door telling my mother her husband had been found in a nearby woods, lashed to a tree, disemboweled while still alive, his innards spread across the ground and into the surrounding trees as if a terrible ritual had been performed.
I said, “I’ll remember it forever.”
“Do you remember the knife I used, Carson? You do, don’t you? Father’s old hunting knife, the one he’d gotten from his father? Hidden in the back of his top desk drawer?”
I felt the knife in my hand as if I’d held it yesterday. Razor sharp. Hickory handle, an eight-inch stainless-steel blade with a curve like a gentle smile.
“Of course,” I said. “I know the knife. Why is this important to—”
“Did I ever tell you why I selected it?”
“I don’t know. I guess it was close and wouldn’t be missed.”
My brother shook his head like I was wasting his time. “Don’t be a simpleton, Carson. It was Daddy’s beloved knife. I needed to do something very important with it. But first, I needed to perform a magic trick: I had to move the knife from his alliance to mine.”
My brother’s voice had dropped into a soft monotone and I again felt him leading me into the chaos of his mental landscape. “You’re talking about befriending wood and metal?” I scoffed.
“I’m talking about a power akin to magic, Carson. Gaining power over the past. I started by opening the drawer to get the knife used to seeing me. Later, I took it on visits to my room where it learned to trust me. After I’d made the knife mine, I put it above the ceiling tiles. Beside the light above my bed.”
“Jeremy, this is completely insa—”
“SHUT UP! Whenever Father entered my room, he walked beneath the knife. I visualized fingers of blood-red light reaching from the knife to Daddy dear. It felt delicious. By the time I used the knife, Carson, I had granted it power unheard of by Excalibur: the power to cut me free of my past.”
I shook my head. Excalibur, befriending knives, transforming time through delusions …